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Jeff Garman, a veteran in Las Vegas Review Journal investigative reporter, was no stranger to controversy or the danger of his work. For more than four decades, he wrote stories relentlessly confronting the mob, corrupt politicians, and greedy bureaucrats. As a result, he was often threatened enough that he and his friend and fellow investigative reporter Arthur Kine, sometimes joked about reporting
on these threats if they were ever acted upon. Then, in the spring of twenty twenty two, German received a tip about abuses at a little known county office. His subsequent investigation on earthed a scandalous, sexually incriminating video of a rising politician. The resulting stories in the Review Journal ended the man's political aspirations. Less than six months later, on September three, Garman's lifeless body was discovered outside his
home with multiple stab wounds. His dedicated newsroom colleagues, including Kane, vowed to find the killer. In doing so, they expose the true depths of corruption and malice in Sin City. Meanwhile, the police struggled to identify a suspect until they released a photo of the suspects vehicle to the media. That tip led them to none other than the small time politician, who was subsequently arrested and now faces life in prison pending the outcome of his trial in August twenty twenty four.
In the Last Story, Caine delivers an intense narrative of courage, betrayal, and the unrelenting quest for justice. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Last Story, The Murder of an Investigative Journalist in Las Vegas, with my special guest, investigative journalist and author Arthur Kin. Welcome the program, and thank you very much for this interview.
Arthur Kin, Thanks for having me on the program.
Thank you so much, and congratulations on your new book, The Last Story.
I appreciate that.
Now, just to open, you and Jeff Garman work together as journalists, and you and Jeff used to talk about a promise to each other in jest, tell us before we start about that promise.
It was kind of the newsroom gallows humor. You know. One time I'd had a story that was a pretty good story that ended up getting constable here and dieted, and he came up to my desk and said, hey, you better watch your back. That guy is going to come and get you. And I said, hey, you better
write about it if it happens, right. And so every time one of us would have a hard hitting investigation that got results, the other one would kind of do that as a compliment without getting too mushy and as a kind of, you know, a kind of a joke
or gallows humor. So about a week before I met him at the paper, we had met to talk about a story he had just done, a story that had resulted in someone losing their reelection, and so I kind of we kind of went through that whole monologue or exchange together.
Now, give us your background and when you arrived in Las Vegas, and then also what you learned in writing this book, but also just learning about your colleague Jeff Garman.
So I started at the RJ. At the end of twenty sixteen and was a reporter with Jeff. He was the first person on an investigative team, and I was the second person. He had been an internal candidate. I was hired from the outside. Basically worked pretty closely for about six or seven years, did a lot of investigations together. I think we taught each other a lot. He was
kind of old school guy and who he liked. He work phoned and sources, and I'm kind of public records and data guy, and so we kind of complimented each other in our reporting. So it's pretty much we're working with him on store and by myself, and he would work on stories by himself too, but we collaborate in four or five big investigations that got some pretty decent results.
You talk about the history of the Las Vegas Review Journal, and right away there was had many owners over the years, but there is an owner that raises quite a bit of controversy. Can you explain that.
Yeah, So in twenty fifteen, the paper was purchased by the wealthiest person in Nevada and one of the wealthiest people in the world, Sheldon Attilson, who owned The Venetian at the time. And the Palazzo, two of the biggest casinos on the strip. He was one of the biggest Republican donors. Him and his wife had contributed a lot
of money to Republicans. The controversy kind of began because there was an attempt from him to kind of hide his ownership of the paper, and the reporters that the paper ended up uncovering it and reporting who bought the paper.
It wasn't the best start for them, But since then they've been pretty good about investing money into the paper and it's become a pretty I think their resources have definitely improved the product and the paper and definitely allow us to have a big investigative team, which some papers are getting rid of.
You talk about Jeff Garman and his tenure as a journalist in Las Vegas for almost forty years before his death. But he didn't start at the Review Journal, the Las Vegas Review Journal. He started at the Las Vegas Sun. So tell us about his career just briefly, the kinds of cases that he was very interested in and the kinds of stories that he did end up breaking.
Yeah, he graduated from Marquette with a masters degree and came right to Vegas. Worked at the Sun for a couple of I think three decades. What's a columnist an investigative reporter there a courts reporter, did some politics cover and stuff like that, and you know, broke some pretty big stories about the mob, broke stories about corruption in government.
I had some hustles, got punched one time by a guy who was collecting who was a court bailiff, but he was also collecting money for the sheriff campaign and also for a bookie. And Jeff was writing about him and the guy and they guess they confronted each other at a bar and the guy ended up punching Jeff, but Jeff kept writing about him after that. He wasn't towed by that, and so he spent quite a bit of time at the Sun, and then he was laid
off even though he was a very prominent journalist. And then he came to the RJ in twenty ten as a courts reporter and then was promoted to investigations right about the time that right before the time I joined it in twenty sixteen.
You right about the unique situation in Las Vegas, given its CD backgroundund of mob organized crime history in Las Vegas, the building of Las Vegas itself, but then also the influence of organized crime currently at the time that Jeff was reporting for the Review Journal and the Sun about its influence on politicians and all kinds of elected officials in the Las Vegas area.
Well, yeah, I think that was. You know, Jeff was about fifteen twenty years older than me, so in the eighties, I was in elementary school or junior high when he was doing all this reporting. But what really struck me in my research was how much the mob, and if not the mob, people with severe major criminal backgrounds, people who had been accused of killing people, people who've been accused of of all kinds of crimes were basically part
of the establishment here. You would have someone like many Union who had been suspected in five murders in Texas and fled because the sheriff who was protecting him was voted at office, fled to Vegas to escape prosecution, having regular lunches with a federal judge who was here, right, and so it was it was really the corruption was just kind of part. You know, they were the elite.
The people who were were we would think of as criminals now, were the elite and everybody kowtowed to them, from the governor on down to the DA and all these other people, And so it was a very interesting situation.
I can't imagine something like that in that time. I mean, obviously you probably had stuff like that in Chicago in the twenties and thirties, things like that, but in America, you just it was a pretty unique situation, a very very eye opening for me, who didn't really I mean, I knew there was a mob history, but I didn't realize how influential and how much they were in society in Vegas until I started reporting this book.
You talked about the binion and also that Jeff Garman reported on mob cases like the Ted Binyon case. But you also explained that, of course American journalists don't have the same fear factor that you write about the journalists in Russia and Mexico, and the threats, the imminent death threats that those journalists face is very very rare, and deaths of journalists, murders of journalists is very very rare
in America. But that also that Jeff had established himself as a respected journalist that could criticize mob figures and still be considered doing justice job.
Yeah. I mean, the thing about it is that, obviously, if you look at and I did an analysis of the Committee to Protect Journalists Data, you look at certain countries, there are dozens or hundreds of journalists killed every year for what they're writing. Here, you've got a dozen or so killed, and almost all of them were by you know, gangsters or criminals, or five of them were killed in a mass shooting, which is just now part of the fabric of society now, and it was a disgruntled reader,
you know, who walked into a newspaper. Fortunately, and I hope we keep it that way or even reduce it. But it's very rare for a journalists to fear physical retribution. There's a lot of otherwise retribution where people are trying to get you fired or de platformed or something like that, but as far as hearing for your life, it's pretty rare. And so for something, you know, for journalists to be
murdered in America is still a huge story. I mean, we were flooded with requests from every paper and every TV station after Jeff's death in the country and probably some international stuff. So it's definitely a unique story to hear, and we hope to keep it very unique.
Now, Jeff was dealing with some stories right up to his death, and you and Jeff had worked on a story just recently before his death. So tell us what you were working on and the last story that you worked on with Jeff.
The last story we worked on together was it was a couple of years before. We started, right around the time of the pandemic, so it took a little while longer because there's all this pandemic stuff that we were doing, but separately, but we did a story about the former Clark County corner who was we had found was you know, it looked like he was using his vacation time but then not logging and so they was able to cash
it out. He was traveling around the country giving speeches about the October one mass shooting, which I think everybody's familiar with the Mandalay Bay shooting, right, and he was taking paid speeches when he wasn't taking were supposed to take vacation time if they were paid. But during that whole time, his whole office ended up being I guess
a nest of sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct. But there wasn't anyone really, it looked like from our reporting that there wasn't someone mining the store, and so we had done three or four big stories about that right around the time we started, right around the time of COVID, and it was probably about a year before his death is when we did those stories. But we had met to talk about another story we'd worked on together, as was about a councilwoman named Michelle Fiori that he had
been covering a lot. That's that's the reason we met right before his death, was to talk about whether we wanted to work on some other stuff he had found about her. That's the first time I'd seen him since COVID started in person, and we had some zooms and we had lots of calls, but that was the first time we got together in a person in person for a couple of years.
Let's talk about now. Labor Day twenty twenty two and executive editor Glenn Cook gets a call from police Sheriff Joe Lombardo. Now, what's the call about. What do you have to say?
Still, Yeah, it was a Saturday, right before Labor Day, long weekend. He gets a call from Lombardo, and Lombardo says, I'm calling about Jeff Garman. Do you know what I'm calling about? And Glenn was helping his son with some homework. Assumed it was about a story because police and the RJ have a pretty contentious relationship, and so he assumed
it was something Jeff was working on. But it was strange because Jeff was really good about keeping all of his editors updated, and so he couldn't remember a hard hitting story about Lombardo the police department, and at the time, Lombardo was running for governor, which he ended up successfully coming governor, and so he was kind of racking his brain and then the sheriff flirts out Jeff's dead. And of course, you know, Jeff was sixty nine years old.
He'd had some health problems. So the first thing your mind comes to is, oh, my god, he had some sort of a medical issue and and he is, you know, collapsed or something like that. And so the sheriff was really kind of coy about the whole situation and didn't really say much. They said, wow, he's at the corner.
We're trying to find out what happened. He was really scratched up things like that, and so so that was the Saturday, and then and then later on there was a press conference about a murder in Jeff's neighborhood, and one of the editors looked and said, oh my god, that that that murder is a block away from where Jeff's body was found in front of his house. And so at that point we realized that it wasn't someone
scratched up. It was basically a homicide that took a whole different you know, obviously tone for people, and it was a much much, much more you know story. The story was much bigger. Now I've been a murder instead of instead of a fatality based on health for some other reason, it was it was a homicide, and so everybody kind of jumped on that story right away and tried to figure out what happened.
You're right that the police have a hearing or a briefing and not much information is released, but in subsequent days there is a fair amount of information, especially given about now the coroner has decided that this is a homicide. So tell us what you and the other people at the newspaper learn about Jeff Garriman's murder.
Well, I mean, it was it didn't take a corner to find out us. He was stabbed seven times in the neck and chest, so there was no doubt that it was a homicide, and we actually knew about it. We call know, the leadership called sheriff back and he confirmed after, you know, after we knew about the press conference that Jeff was who they suspect a murder. So but it was a who done it at that point, because you know, Jeff had upset a lot of people.
It also police were acting like, well, this could be a personal thing where he has some sort of a personal relationship with this person, because they always jumped to that instantly, is if someone is killed there did they have. Is that a girlfriend boyfriend situation or is this a jilted husband or something? You know, it was really kind of a who done it? Obviously, we knew some of the stories he was working on, and we one of the editors gave the police a list of the stories
he had been working on. But I I personally was hearing from my sources that this was probably something like either a robbery gone wrong or or some sort of a personal thing and not really related to his work. And then they released a video of a guy a big hat that looks like a landscaper or a construction worker. There's a there's a lot of roadwork going on right next to right north of Jeff's house, so he fits in with all the people who are walking around there
with that in a big sun and hat. You know, it's it's hot, it's one hundred plus degrees. They have to protect themselves from the sun. So the first thing we get is a video of this guy walking around the neighborhood. They say is a suspect, but they don't know who he is. They can't see his face. It was kind of who done it and people were obviously we were obviously interested in who it was, and everybody
was interested. It was the biggest story of town. But we didn't really really have anything but theories at that point that at one point they so police are pretty tight lipped about cases where they know what's going on, but this his cases a who done it for them? So they every day they'd had a press conference and they would release some more information, and then at one point they released a maroon older Denali type of SUV truck that was driving in the neighborhood and they said
was driven by the suspect. They got They got a tax from someone in the county who said, hey, the public administrator who Jeff had written about has access to just such a truck. And about the same time, one of our assistant city editors had gotten a text from a source saying, hey, look at this, there's a truck just like that in front of the public administra this guy named Robert Tais in front of the public administrator's house.
And then at that point it really got it really got interesting and just crazy because if the public administrator was a suspect and Jeff murdered, that was probably the first time in seventy years that a journalist was allegedly killed by a public government elected official. That's when the story really ramped up and we kind of just hit the ground running.
You immediately thought it was sounded sort of insane for somebody to do something like that over an article that had already already been published. You thought, maybe for a pending article that would be runeous, but in this case it was the article had already been published. Now, getting to investigate this Robert TEIs, you go back and the newspaper goes back to the cases that he was working on.
They obviously was one of them was Robert Tais. But you go back to all of the confrontation, the tapes, all the footage that they have, and look at his behavior and his reaction to Jeff Jerman's articles in the paper.
Yeah, I mean he so Basically what happened is Jeff had written a couple of stories about this guy being inappropriate, kind of a bad boss thing, you know, verbally abusive towards people, moving people for no reason, just being a bully at work. And on top of that, his employees and his office had caught him on video in the backseat of suv with one of his subordinates, but both
of whom were married. And so after that story ran, there was a primary where he lost his primary and was going to be out of office by the end of the year. After that, he had sent some texts, some tweets out basically making fun of Jeff. It didn't it wasn't threatening in that I'm going to come get him. It was kind of going, doesn't Jeff have anything better to do? Jeff looking through my garbage, which he obviously wasn't, but he was joking. And when he finds the sushi
containers and the pizza container. He's going to say, I'm part of the Kuza and part of the mob, and so it was just him kind of blowing off steam, which happens a lot in stories that you know are true. And we find somebody who who has public foibles and they don't like that was exposed. But nothing there would have indicated any kind of a threat or else we would have taken precautions, and so it was definitely surprising
for everyone to think that was a suspect. And you know, a few days later he ends up getting arrested for the murder.
You wrote about the photos that they have and that the police release, and you said, a big floppy hat to protect against one hundred and ten degrees that these guys were working in. But he didn't have construction boots, and he had designer jeans, and he had runners, they had sneakers. So when they did get a search warrant for his house, what did they find.
Well, they found the hat had been cut up, but in stashed in the garage, they found one of the sneakers cut up and one of them, I assume probably being ready to cut up. They found a bag that looked a lot like what the suspect was wearing they found, so basically what it looked like is that he had They never found a knife that was used in the homicide,
but they basically for some reason. If he is convicted of this, and he hasn't gone to trial, so we don't know that he is a personal who did this, but if he's convicted for this, there's a real question of why he got rid of the knife but kept the shoes with blood on him and the hat that was you know, had the same little vent holes that they see on the video and all this other stuff.
So there's some real questions about why he just didn't dispose them in the same way he disposed of the knife, because no one who knows where the knife is very interesting.
We haven't mentioned that the footage that he was caught on which didn't recognize his face, couldn't really show his face, but it was interesting that he left the premises he was parked across the street. He left, but then came back, and it looked like just a check to make sure that Garriman was actually dead.
Oh yeah, that whoever, Yeah, if it was him or whoever did it, there's definitely surveillance video from the neighbor across the street of him leaving and then a few seconds later driving back. So he parked the car outside of Jeff's call the sack or the suv outside of Jeff's Cali sack. He goes behind Jeff's gate, jumps out as Jeff is is coming around. We're not sure why. Maybe he'd made some noise or something Jeff was going to investigate. Jumps out from behind the gate to Jeff's backyard.
The stabbing happens in the kind of the side yard in front of the gate. Jeff collapses behind a bush on the side of his house and he walks off quietly, quickly, and then if you let seconds later, the scuv drives. He drives the SUV back into the call to sack, parks it in front of Jeff's driveway and run and walks over quickly, looks looks like he's making sure that there's Jeff's dead and there's not a witness, and then he drives away.
Yeah, it's very interesting. And also you talk about this incriminating damning evidence found at his home, but there was also they take a DNA sample from underneath Jeff's gernails.
And that's what it was an interesting thing. I talked about it a little bit. But usually in a situation like this, if you've got that kind of evidence, you've got a car that was in the area, you've got you know, you've got pretty good idea of a person who had some sort of motive, they would arrest him. But the DA in this case, maybe because he's a
public official, I don't know, maybe he's a lawyer. I don't know why, but the DA refused to allow police to arrest him until they got the DNA evidence back from under the skin under Jeff's fingernail, until it matched has according to police did. That was when they were able to go arrest him. And by that time, he'd holed up in his house, had slashed his wrists in
the bathtub, was trying to kill himself. They actually sent in a drone to make sure there was no danger to the the police officers who were going to knock down the door, and then they eventually got him to come out, put him in an ambulance for his wounds. He's been in the Our County Detention Center ever since.
But Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now one of the things that you do, and I guess police obviously would do as well. But for this book, you go into Taos's background to try to explain this kind of unexplainable behavior.
Yeah, I mean, here's the thing that the office is so minor and so unknown. Basically, the office is a dozen people that he runs, and he takes over the probate or the office public Administrator takes over probate cases of people who don't have family members to deal with their state after they die. And so it's a pretty obscure county office. I'm not sure why they have elected official as as supposed to appoint an official on it.
But the office sobscure that he didn't really when he was running for office, nobody wrote about it, nobody did into it. He actually ended up getting arrested for domestic assault against his wife while he was in office, and no one even picked up on that because it was in city court instead of district court, because it was
a minor offense at that point. She wasn't severely injured or anything like that, and nobody covers city court because it's DUIs and domestics and there's a lot of those in Vegas and so but instantly we started the investigative team. So basically the Metro team started following the homicide and the court cases and all that, and the investigative team
started digging into who is this guy really? And one of my colleagues did a long profile that found that he had had all kinds of abusive and inappropriate behavior throughout the years, starting at university a law at the UNLV law school, he was got drunk and made some inappropriate advances at a party and then made some threats
afterwards about suing people and things like that. When he opened up his own private practice after passing the bar, there was really an appropriate conduct with some of the employees, and then when he got into office it looked like that type of conduct continued. It was a pattern that we only uncovered afterwards because before that it was just such a small office that no one was really covering.
One of the issues that comes up and as a primary part of this book is the challenge for the Review Journal to preserve the confidential sources that they believe should be on Jeff's phone, which is confiscated by the police and their investigation there was also the issue of four computers at work, or two computers at work, four computers at Jeff's home. So tell us just a little bit about this battle that begins for his devices electronic devices.
Right, and that that's kind of a very important precedental case that we've spent since just that fighting and may continue even further on, because there's a lot of back and forth. So basically, they find Jeff's body, there's a there's a his iPhone, which at the paper we're reimbursed, we're given a certain amount every month, but we have our own phone. We do get computers from the paper, but his was in the it getting repaired, so his work computer wasn't there. But they find the phone in
his pocket. They find poor computers in a hard drive in his house that were all his personal computers that he used for work. And so at that point we know his phone is chocked full of forty years of contacts and confidential sources, many of whom probably work in the DA's office and the police who want may want to see those people and may want to know who's talking to Jeff. Additionally, his computers have probably have drafts of stories, documents he received tips, emails, that kind of
stuff from confidential sources. Police say, okay, they initially look at the phone just to see if there was a text saying hey, I'm coming to get you, or a
meeting or something that would give him a suspect. And after that we find out that these devices exist, we instantly go to court and get a restraining order to prevent the police from from looking at the devices until we can get a ruling on whether there's confidential sources, which we know there are because Jeff worked sources like nobody in this town, and he knew people for forty years, so there were a lot of people talking to him.
And so this ends up being a huge fight. The prosecutor and police contend that we have no right to intervene in the case. We have no standing because a the devices weren't the devices were not the newspaper's devices, they were just the personal devices. So if anybody can intervene to be his family, which who did not intervene
to protect his sources? And we argued that because we have a very strong shield law in Nevada, that the shield law protects the reporter after his death and allows the agency or the news organization that he worked for to exert that privilege when he couldn't do it. The shield law would be pretty worthless, is if you could kill a reporter and then get all his sources. In November of last year, we won historic ruling. Basically the Supreme Court nanaiostly ruled that yes, the shield law extends
after a reporter's death. Yes the news organization can exert that privilege on their behalf, and yes the police can't search those devices without somebody else taking out anything that could be privileged journalistic materials. Fight was very expensive. I don't have an exact figure, and I know in court they talked about a million plus on our side. The you know, they spent a lot of time on the on the prosecutors and the police side, and hire their
counsel and their legal teams. So at that point, once we win the police department, which has been nothing but obstructionist and fighting for every little thing, because we had initially said, look, let us take out all the confidential sources. We can appoint a judge and a former prosecutor to look at this stuff and find anything that might be
relevant to the case. Because obviously the prosecutors arguing that the defendant has a right to discovery in those devices in case there's someone else who could be a suspect, and they wanted nothing to do with it. So the second we win, they call us up and say, Okay, why don't you guys look through the instead of hiring these outside people do why don't you guys look through the devices, tell us what's privileged and then go from there.
And so we've had these devices, but we're still fighting on how on how much is privilege and what's privilege and how much they're going to ask for and stuff like that. So it's been a long legal battle.
You talk about the long legal battle despite you right, despite all of these you know, the damning evidence, the DNA and all of the other evidence, including the photo of the vehicle. And what is this person's defense? What is he claiming? Is his defense?
Okay, well, he spoke to me from jail video link, and his contention is there was a company called there was a company, a real estate company that was doing
things that he felt were inappropriate in probate cases. And state law allows anybody who's not a felon in over eighteen to take over a probate case if there's no family, even if they have no connection to the family, And so he felt that there was a real estate company that was inappropriate taking people's houses, and when he was in office, he was fighting to try to get them to stop and try to get them investigated. His contention is that they framed him for Jeff's murder because they
wanted him out of office. He was being a nuisance to their business, so they framed him for Jeff's murder. And when I asked him, well, how did the DNA get there, He's like, I don't know, We're still investigating that kind of thing. But that's his contention, and that that is probably going to be his defense from what we could tell so far that he's after I talked to him, he ended up talking about this in open court.
I expect if the trial goes to August in August, that he will be maintaining that he was set up by this real estate company, which of course denies any involvement in the case.
It's very interesting when you talk about Alicia Goodwin, her version of events when she was with the with his firm, and the conversation she had, her religious background, she claims changed their relationship irrevocably from that point.
Yeah, so Alicia is one of the people who was filing complaints against Rob Tais in his office, and he said that, and she had claimed she was actually the only one who actually filed two formal complaints. Everybody else
was just kind of complaining behind the scenes. And she maintained that they had a pretty good relationship until he found out that she was the Mormon, and then he started talking about the Mormon mafia running the Nevada and all this other stuff, and so that she felt that he reassigned her and basically demoted her and took away
out of her job functions. And so she was one of the people who started following him and got the video of him and the other employee in the back seat of her the employees suv at outlet mall not far from the office. Video that is kind of hard to explain why you're what kind of professional thing you could be doing in the backseat of a car. And so she had gotten they'd followed him half a dozen, maybe nine ten times and gotten different video that they gave to Jeff And so that was kind of the
beginning of the story. And I suspect from Jeff's point of view, I think the video is probably the most damning part of the story because a lot of it was kind of he said, she said, he claimed, they claimed that he did these things. He said, No, they're just bad employees. I'm not one hundred percent sure Jeff would have gone forward with the story without the video, but clearly having a subordinate, having an appropriate relationship with a subordinate, you know, is not is not appropriate. It's
against county rules. And so I think that pushed it over to a story for Jeff. So, yeah, Alicia was a key actor in getting Jeff to work on the story. And actually her father had been a source of Jeff's for years and years because he used to be a Metro detective, and so her father actually reached out to Jeff when other media didn't want to do the story, and that's how they kind of connected with the people who were complaining about Rob Tayas in the Public Administration office.
Now, what is the local the Las Vegas and the national and international reaction once they find that a journalist has been killed by this taus and the reasons for the murder itself? How big a story is this and how does the review Journal handle it all?
Yeah, So, just to be fair, he's accused but not convicted, so we don't know if he killed them until he gets convicted. Each he's an innocent person. But obviously the reaction was huge. We were I was because I was, you know, working closely with Jeff. They asked me to take a lot of the media stuff. So I was on CNN, I was on Fox, I was on various shows, podcasts, other people. People talked to big papers, New York Times,
La Times, A lot of papers sent correspondence here. CBS ended up sending people for a week, did a long thing, and then forty hours more recently did a whole hour on it. It was a big story nationally internationally because, like I said earlier, unless it's the last time we could find a government official killing a reporter because of
his story. Was in the forties in Texas where sheriffs were a sheriff for our assistant sheriff killed a radio reporter who was investigating some of his properties for prostitution. So we're talking about close to sixty or seventy years. All the other journalists who were killed, and there were more than a dozen were either killed in the mass shooting I mentioned, or were killed by a gang member
or a mobster or something like that. So it's extremely extremely unusual for a government elected official to go this, and you're talking about a guy who has a law degree. He did lose the reelection, possibly most likely because of Jeff's stories, But if he ended up killing Jeff, it's completely surprising because it wasn't like this story got him indicted. It wasn't like the story, you know, would prohibit him from going back to legal practice and going on with
his life. His wife is stuck behind behind him, despite the video of him in the car with this woman, so it didn't even break up his family, and so surprising if he is the person and the police and prosecutors say did it. If he is the one, it's really kind of a head scratcher because why would you go to that extent for the damage has already been done. You've lost your you've lost your reelection. There's nothing anybody
can do about that. Killing Jeff doesn't get you back, and it just puts you in more trouble.
If he did it, let's just just as an opportunity to hear these messages. Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sen And you write about in the book your conversation with Taos and you challenge some of the things he says. Can you it's a pretty dramatic scene. Can you can you recreate that for us somewhat?
Yeah? Sure. You know, I sit down with him. It's in a loud room because there's other people talking to their friends and family who've been arrested over over video links. I'm trying to put my recorder to my ear and still ask questions, and so I want to you know, I went there assuming he didn'tn't want to talk about the case. I wanted to learn a little bit more
about him. And then he said, no, I don't want to talk to you about my personal history because I might want to work on a book with someone, right. I said, okay, And I said, well, what are we doing here then? Because he has to prove the interview. You can't just show up and force him to do an interview. So I had to lie to police to do it. He goes, well, let's talk about the case.
And first he wanted to relitigate whether or not he was a bad boss and whether or not Jeff's stories were fair and accurate, right, And then I started, I said, well, do you want to talk about the murder case? And he says, yeah, I mean, I'm innocent. I've never I would never do anything like that. I'm I'm a good person. You know, I've made mistakes in my past. I know, choked my wife, but I was drinking and I was
an alcoholic, so I stopped drinking after that. And I had meant making mistakes in you know, other parts of my life, but who hasn't. But I would never kill anybody. And that's when he comes out and said and I said, well who does. And we had heard some inklings that he was going to blame this, this real estate company, and I said, well who did it? And he starts talking about the real estate company and that he set him up. And I said, look, Rob, who's going to
believe that. I mean, it's very unlikely, not only that they would kill someone, but it's very unlikely that if they wanted to kill some get rid of you, they would just kill you instead of the person who was basically responsible for taking you out of office. And then he says, well, if they killed me, then the investigation would a snowball on them, and here they were able to look make me look like I'm crazy and took me out. And I said, but you know, you were
already kind of out. They only had to wait three months before your time in office is done. And then I said, well, what happened with you?
Know?
Where were you? He's like, oh, I was at home alone, because the cell phone was at home, and because he left it at home because cell phones can be tracked. Right if he ends up being convicted of the killer, He's smart enough to leave a cell phone at home so it wouldn't be tracked to the site. He said, I was just at home alone. How did they get
your DNA? Well, I don't know, but you know, and I said, you know, the figure looks kind of like you, and he goes, yeah, well, that person could have just planted the DNA after the stabbing, and so he could never really explain how they got DNA from him the plant, even which would be a really difficult thing for some random person to get somebody else's the DNA, especially skin scraping.
It's one thing to get him, you know, follow him to Starbucks and grab their their coffee cup after they throw it away, but that's not what they according to police, what they found. So yeah, it was an interesting I found it very interesting because he was saying stuff that was very hard to believe, but he was very earnest about it and didn't appear to be out of his mind. He just had this this story that I think a lot of people have heard it were pretty incredulous about it.
So it was I'm surprised he talked to me. He's been talking to a lot of reporters. Was kind of surprised that he would lay that all out there before the trial, because, you know, gives a prosecutors and police an idea of where he's going to go.
He also say it's unusual for a person like him in his situation to also speak to other media, but he had also granted interviews to other media. If I'm not correct, he also granted an interview to an RJ reporter Newburgh. I'm not correct.
Yeah, Caitlin has talked to him several times and she is. Yeah, He's talked to her repeat about the case because she's the one kind of thing on the ground. She's a courts reporter. She's a really good reporter, hard working, really dedicated and she's been following this case from the day he was arrested, and he ended up talking to a TV station, so she decided to try and sure enough, he was okay. I'm not sure if he turned down
any of his requests. I went to final I went an additional step to ask for his visitor logs for the book, just to see who who was visiting him, and there was a number of reporters he ended up talking to forty eight hours on camera when they did the big piece, the hour long piece on the RJ's reaction in RJ's work after the after Jeff's murders. So he has been very unusual for suspect to do this.
A lot of it probably extends the fact that most of the time he's represented himself, and he's gone through several attorneys, but he's continuing to talk even though he has a pretty high profile defense attorney who's pretty credible. You know, most defense attorneys tell you not to talk, right, don't talk to police, definitely, don't talk to the media.
But he's ignoring that and and wants to be have his voice heard in it, and so we obviously are more than happy to allow him to put his side out.
There was the Review Journal involved at all in the investigation of his claim that he was indigened despite owning properties.
Yeah, so I did that story. So basically the way the law works is you get a public defender only if you're completely indigen You have no resources, you have no income, you have nothing in the bank account. So I had gotten a tip after he had signed that paper claiming that he had written on the paper that he had some rental properties, but there was no other information about it, and there was no sense of whether
they were worth anything. So I had gotten a tip that some of these rental properties are in Hot Springs, and so I was able to track them down, but basically it was an l blind LLC, so I couldn't find anything. What I did is I called up the tax collector's office in Hot Springs and said, Hey, are any of the you guys ever sent tax bills to Rob Tayas's address in Las Vegas? I had I knew his address, and they said, yeah, here it is, and on those tax bills were the properties right, So it
was clear that they were his. In fact, the day after my story ran with a police source that I have fairly high up called me up and it's like, how the heck did you get that? We were been looking for those properties for weeks? And so, yeah, he had several properties worth quite a bit of money. He ended up selling him recently to pay for this attorney. He had some money in the bank, his wife was
still making money. So we questioned. We wrote a story questioning why taxpayers were paying for his legal defense, and a few days later he ended up dropping his public defender. I don't know, I don't I doubt it's because of our story. He's been going through attorneys. I think he went through four or five different attorneys. But when he wanted a public defender again, the judge finally did the right thing and held it indiagency hearing and said that
he couldn't have it because he does have resources. He has property, he has a house, he has he has family who has money. And so he ended up having to pay for his own attorney and went through a few more and now has a new attorney that he got recently.
Who is the new attorney that he.
Has, Draskovic. He's a pretty high profile criminal defense attorney, has done a lot of cases and has had some pretty good success of getting people mistrials and things like that. He has quite a bit of credibility. Some of the other attorneys he hired were good attorneys, but didn't have the experience in a high profile murder cases that the attorney has now. But the issue is how much how much of the attorney's advice is Rob Tays really listening
to if he's still agreeing to talk to reporters. So obviously the attorney has atorne a client privilege. He can't talk to us about his interactions there. But it seems like Rob is very is very in control, in charge. He is a lawyer. He never did any he didn't do any serious criminal work. He was a probate lawyer. I think he did a dui or something. But he's definitely knows what he wants. He believes, or at least he says it repeatedly that he believes he's going to
walk out of there after the trial. He wanted the trial to happen in March because he thought that he was going to quit it and why spend any more time at the Clark County Detention Center sitting there with no bail. It's going to be an interesting case, and that it would be interesting to see what his attorney does and what he what kind of defense he puts up.
It's interesting in representing himself he is doing. I think in his mind that he is also representing himself as an attorney might in a high profile case like this, trying to somehow affect the jury pool with his interviews that he does.
Yes, that's possible, or he wants he doesn't want. You know, the problem with not speaking to the media is then you have no comment and your side is never out. So I think he's hoping to get the side of his side out into the media. Maybe some juries will hear it, maybe they won't. It also kind of locks them into a story because I knew full well when I was talking to him that the police were recording this conversation on video link. And I'm sure as an
attorney he's He's not stupid, he knows that's happening. So now he has at least his legal strategy out there, and prosecutors can look for ways to thwart it well before the case comes to the trial. I don't know for a fact, but I suspect that some of his issues with changing attorneys where they were telling him, look, Rob, the case is pretty overwhelming. You should try to we should try to get you a police so you don't spend the rest of your life in prison. And he
doesn't want to do it. He's maintaining his innocence and he has a right to a trial. The question of the matter is how effective is his defense going to be with what he has put out there? And you know, juries aren't predictable. You know, we just we just had oj Dye and we all remember what happened in that case. I think most people thought he was going to be convicted and he was absolved of the murder. So you never know. I mean, maybe he has a story that
will appeal to the jury. We'll have to see when it actually goes to trial, because it doesn't look like it doesn't look like he's going to take a plead of any sort.
When is the trial scheduled for? Do you know?
It's scheduled now for first Monday in August, the fifth of August. But it was supposed to happen in March. And the reason it didn't happen in March is because we were still the RJ was still reviewing Jeff's devices for what could and couldn't be privileged as far as sources and journalistic materials, and so initially he wanted to go forward without that, but then the prosecutors wanted the stuff, and then I think his conturney convinced him to delay
it until August. So as soon as we have an agreement with police and prosecutors on what we turn over and we don't turn over, a bunch of us are going to be there's a dozen of us who have been authorized by the court to look at the devices, find out where the sources and the religion material is that police and prosecutors can't look at.
Oh, very interesting. What we haven't mentioned though in this and just to sort of wrap up this story, is the injuries that Jeff Garriman endured right in his front yard of his home and wasn't found by the neighbor till the next day covered in blood, but right away his crodit artery was slashed and he was stabbed in the neck three times, but then three times in the
torso as well. So this was, as you write, a brutal and gruesome murder in revenge for an article written in a newspaper, and you explained throughout this book the dangerous characters that Jeff Garriman dared to write about mob figures. Even one mob figure said I will kill you after writing an article. So he was a fearless with great integrity, this journalist. And you do write about his enduring legend, what his reputation was as a journalist after the news of his murder.
Yeah, I mean, obviously big thing for us is when we got the autopsy report, we wanted to know if he suffered. Did he lay there for twelve hours twenty four hours before he died, just immobilized. Fortunately, all the experts thought he was pretty he probably was dead before he fell because those injuries were so severe. He was able to scratch the suspect allegedly according to police, and get DNA. His life legacy, he's definitely I call him
the quintessential Las Vegas journalists. He's been there for he'd been there for forty years. His killing, he was inducted in the Hall of Fame by the never Ada Press Association. And he you know, he basically the he tracked Vegas. He was he was a huge almost like a historian. His stories tracked Vegas through late seventies to the current time, which was one of the most interesting times in Vegas because that's when the mob was was pushed out and
when the corporations kind of took over the casinos. He definitely is will be missed, and he definitely has a a place in the history of this town that he's created through his hard work and is digging in his his tenacity.
Tell us about when you talk about his legacy murder in Sin City, and also the podcast Mobbed.
Up Right, So he had always wanted to write a book in the he there was a guy Binion. Benny Binyon was the guy I talked about earlier who had created a Binion's Horseshoe and been a big, big, big casino owner downtown, very checkered history. His son was running the casino because after a while Benny's history allowed didn't allow him to have a license. But his son had some similar problem or had not similar problems. He had
different problems. He had a drug addiction, He was divorced, ended up moving in with a woman who had a boyfriend of her own, and then he was found dead. They initially thought it was a drug overdose, but then police and prosecutors decided that the woman and her boyfriend had killed him for the money because the boyfriend was caught digging up a bunch of silver and chips, casino chips and other valuables in the desert outside of Perump, which is about sixty miles away, And so Jeff covered
the case. He was a courts reporter for the Sun and ended up writing a book called Murder in Sin City about this case and ended up being a really high profile case. There was actually a few books written about it, but his was made into a made for TV movie with some pretty well known actress and actresses. More recently in We Have, We Have, We Have. This is our third season. We have a season called We Have a Podcast. The RJ producers a podcast called mobbed Up,
pretty popular podcast Wired. Wired magazine called it one of the best crime podcasts and it gets a lot of listeners. And basically every season is one other, one section of what the Mob's history is in Las Vegas. And Jeff did season two reluctantly at first, but we all think he did a really good job. In fact, he wanted to have had a Press Association award after his death for season two of mobbed up as the best podcast. He talked about his experiences covering the Mob and the
purchase of the Aladdin. There was a big fight between Johnny Carson and Wayne Newton bob who would purchase the property, and so that was his season of and there's a lot of recollections. He talked a little bit about that punch by the by the who is working for the for the loan Shark and it was I remember that as being a very emotional Press Association Awards because we
were there. I had won substancial number of awards, but the big thing was him being inducted in the Hall of Fame and him getting award for the podcast that he didn't want to do but ended up really loving and getting a lot of publicity for and a lot of accolades for. And it was really well done. It's worth listening to. You can hear Jeff Voyce still.
Absolutely you considered Jeff a respected colleague. And this book tell us what the purpose of this book is. We talked about at the very beginning the promise you made to Jeff if anything were to happen, But tell us about the promise of this book for you.
So that that meeting that we had before. About a week before his death, I talked to him. He go, hey, that Rob Tayos guy, he's pretty upsets tweeting about you, and he took him out of office. You better watch your back, which is kind of our kind of you know, our kind of little gallows joke. And he goes, well, you're better write about it if anything happens, and I'm like, yeah, yeah, of course not in assuming nothing happened. We did this
a dozen times. Right after he was killed. I decided that even though that promise was in jest, that I would keep that promise. It was important A to keep the promise, B and more importantly to tell Jeff's story as a cautionary tale about what can happen when government corruption and government malfeasance is exposed and if police are
are and prosecuted are right. Person who got exposed didn't like it, and so we definitely want I definitely wanted to show his life, his career, and what happened to him so people would understand it. And that's kind of what the Last story is all about. Jeff's last story.
Absolutely, I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking about your book, The Last Story The Murder of an Investigative Journalist in Las Vegas. So could you tell us where they might find out more information about this book and the publisher? Could you tell us that?
So The Last Stories On will be published August thirtieth. It's already on Amazon for pre order, both kindle and the hardcover and a paperback too, and I think there's gonna be an audiobook coming out. You can see my page on Wild Blue Press where the book. You can also link to the book, and you can follow me and Twitter at Arthur m Kin and is my middle initial,
like Mary. Arthur m Kin is my Twitter handle, And obviously, even though I rarely write for the R jam Moore because I'm an editor, you can see my work my bio there and the work of my reporters on the investigative team.
Thank you so much, Arthur Kine The Last Story, The Murder of an Investigative Journalist in Las Vegas. Thank you so much for this interview. And you have a great evening, good night, good too.
Thank you, thank you.